Title: La Visita
Director: Jorge Leandro Colás
Duration: 1h 11m
Country: Argentina
Year: 2019
The Visit
A cold, foggy night. This is the setting for a rather significant part of the lives of women who visit their husbands, brothers, fathers, or partners in the prison located in the small Argentinian town of Sierra Chica. This periodical, sometimes daily return has determined some of them to share not just their stories, but also their dwellings, their money and, most of all, their salami, cigarettes and biscuits brought as gifts for those on the other side of the fences. The fences – broken, derelict - are, in fact, another leitmotif of their lives, for the ritual demands that every day the guards open them in order to allow the prisoners to reunite with their loved ones. Another recurring element is the bar nearby, where all the women stop by to charge their phones, drink coffee and buy some final knick-knacks for the men. The film grants us access into the atmosphere and cadence of the visits of these women, whom we eventually come to know, though fleetingly and superficially, but enough to understand how much love, how much suffering and how much devotion hides behind their seemingly simple everyday gestures to make this journey, sometimes from dozens of miles away, to brighten the idle days of their loved ones who are imprisoned. (by Andrei Rus)
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